PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

How it works...

In this recipe, you implemented WMS and WFS services for a PostGIS layer using the MapServer open source web-mapping engine. WMS and WFS are the two core concepts to consider when you want to develop a web GIS that is interoperable across many organizations. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defined these two standards (and many others) to make web-mapping services exposed in an open, standard way. This way these services can be used by different applications; for example, you have seen in this recipe that a GIS Desktop tool such as QGIS can browse and query those services because it understands these OGC standards (you can get exactly the same results with other tools, such as gvSIG, uDig, OpenJUMP, and ArcGIS Desktop, among ...